Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (27 page)

In February 1994, the FBI arrested Aldrich Ames, Moscow’s mole inside the Central Intelligence Agency. He had betrayed dozens of CIA agents in the Soviet Union, causing ten to be executed.

Ames had begun his spying in 1985, while chief of the Soviet counterintelligence branch of the CIA. Although the agent losses were quickly detected by the agency, it took nine years for the CIA to conclude that Ames was the traitor.

Late in 1986, Gardner R. “Gus” Hathaway, then the CIA’s counterintelligence chief, appointed Jeanne R. Vertefeuille to head a special task force to find the penetration who was destroying the agency’s Soviet assets. A short, gray-haired, grandmotherly woman with glasses, Vertefeuille was so unlikely-looking a counterspy that she might have been chosen by central casting for dramatic irony. But Vertefeuille had an encyclopedic knowledge of KGB cases, and it was her mole hunt unit that eventually pinpointed Ames as the spy.

It was not the first time that the intelligence agencies were obliged to search for moles. There had been a long series of secret FBI studies, some run jointly with the CIA, aimed at discovering penetrations in the two agencies. In the 1970s, for example, the FBI had received information suggesting that an unidentified CIA officer had volunteered information to the Russians. The bureau gave that investigation the code name
TRAPDOOR
. The case was closed and reopened several times over the years but never resolved.

When it was learned in 1986 that Valery Martynov and Sergei Motorin, the two FBI assets in the Soviet embassy in Washington, had been
arrested in Moscow and were to be executed, the bureau formed a six-person team to try to learn how the two had been detected. James T. “Tim” Caruso, a counterintelligence supervisor at FBI headquarters, was appointed head of the task force. A tall, intense New Yorker with thinning red hair, Caruso named the task force
ANLACE
, after a tapered medieval dagger. Counterintelligence is painstaking work; fourteen years were to go by before it was understood that the two Soviet assets had been betrayed by both Ames and Hanssen.

Not until April 1991 did Jeanne Vertefeuille’s group and the FBI join forces to try to discover why the agency had lost its network inside the Soviet Union. Jim Holt, who had been Martynov’s case agent, and Jim Milburn—the pair were known as “Jim squared” inside the FBI—both worked on the joint team.

One member of Vertefeuille’s task force was Sandy Grimes, who had come over to the mole hunt team from the CIA’s Soviet division. She had once carpooled with Ames and was struck by how his personality had changed when he came back from Rome sporting expensive Italian suits and capped teeth. It was Grimes who ultimately zeroed in on Ames by comparing the deposits in his bank account to the dates of his lunches with Sergei D. Chuvakhin, a Soviet diplomat in Washington. Ames had official approval to meet the Russian, whom he was supposedly cultivating for the CIA; but Grimes discovered that either on the same day as or the day after each lunch with Chuvakhin, Ames deposited large sums of money in his bank account. She realized then that the mole had to be Ames.

Grimes’s persuasive analysis moved the drama toward its final act. In the spring of 1993, the joint FBI-CIA mole hunt team produced a secret report codenamed
PLAYACTOR/SKYLIGHT
. It estimated that thirty CIA Soviet operations had been sabotaged between 1985 and 1986 and described the efforts of the KGB to deflect the search for a Soviet spy in the CIA. The mole, the report added, must have worked in the CIA’s Soviet division in counterintelligence.

The report amounted to a virtual description of Ames, whose name was included on a list of forty people in an appendix. The joint mole hunt team actually took a vote on who the mole was. At the CIA, according to R. Patrick Watson, the FBI’s number two counterintelligence official at the time, “People sat around a table and voted who was the most likely candidate. Ames got more votes than anyone else.”

In May 993, the FBI opened its case on Ames. It was directed by
Robert M. “Bear” Bryant, the head of the Washington field office, and John Lewis, his deputy. Lewis chose Special Agent Leslie G. Wiser, Jr., to run the squad that placed Ames under surveillance. Both the case and Ames were codenamed
NIGHTMOVER
. Nine months later, the FBI operation culminated in Ames’s arrest.

In the highest councils of the CIA and the FBI, however, the arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994 brought only a fleeting sense of relief. As the damage assessment of the Ames case proceeded, it quickly became apparent that his actions—the betrayal of the CIA’s entire Soviet network—could not explain all of the puzzles still haunting the two agencies. There were a number of anomalies, as such unexplained events are known in the intelligence world, but the one that still loomed largest was the Felix Bloch case.

Somehow the KGB had been able to warn Bloch that he was in danger. And Aldrich Ames had not known about the FBI investigation of Bloch. He did not have access to the case. In the late spring of 1989, when someone had alerted the KGB to the FBI surveillance of Bloch, Ames was winding up a three-year tour in Rome. He did not return to the United States until July 20, 1989, a full month after the telephoned warning to Bloch.

Details are the essence of counterintelligence, and spycatchers must pay close attention to details if they are to prevail. The troublesome facts of the Bloch case could not be ignored.

After the arrest of Aldrich Ames, Senator Dennis DeConcini, the Arizona Democrat who was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, held closed hearings on the case and personally interviewed Ames at length in his jail cell. During the hearings, he said, the FBI made it clear “there has to be another.”

There were other anomalies besides the Bloch case. “There were a lot of things that Ames did not know about,” one CIA man recalled years later. “One of the things was the tunnel. And one or two other bureau technical collection systems that had clearly been compromised.”

One of these was an ingenious FBI operation codenamed
SPIDERWEB
.
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The bureau did not have the manpower to trail every Russian intelligence officer in Washington around the clock, but it devised a
scheme to track them electronically. During the 1980s, the FBI managed to plant devices in the cars used by the Soviets.

The gadgets planted in the cars were neither microphones nor homing devices.
SPIDERWEB
was something new entirely. When a car driven by an intelligence officer passed certain fixed points around the Washington area, the bugs would transmit a signal, rather like the E-ZPass or similar devices that are common today and used by commuters to drive through tollbooths.

Sometime prior to 1991,
SPIDERWEB
crashed. “The devices stopped working,” said one FBI man. “We knew the operation was compromised because the Russians took all their cars into the garage and tore them apart. The bureau’s theory was they found one and pulled all the cars apart and found all of them. In reality, we now know they had been tipped off.”

In the 1980s, Jeanne Vertefeuille had not initially been given the resources she needed to run the CIA’s search for the penetration; as time passed, the agency seemed to have other priorities. It was Paul J. Redmond, a senior CIA counterintelligence officer, who was credited with reviving the mole hunt that in 1994 resulted in the FBI’s successful surveillance and arrest of Aldrich Ames. Within weeks of Ames’s capture, Redmond had set up a Special Investigations Unit (SIU) as a follow-on to the mole hunt unit.

In May 1994, President Clinton, reacting to the Ames case, reshuffled the government’s counterintelligence agencies. It had, after all, taken nine years for the CIA to catch up with Ames. Among other changes, Clinton’s Presidential Decision Directive 24, in an unprecedented action, required that an FBI agent head a Counterespionage Group (CEG) within the CIA’s Counterintelligence Center. It was not a popular move within the CIA, which thought it could do its own spycatching.

And so, against the background of the Bloch mystery and the technical losses, the FBI and the CIA secretly launched a new mole hunt in 1994. To run it, in compliance with the Clinton directive, the FBI selected Ed Curran.

Then fifty, Curran had the right experience and background to try to discover the penetration. Tall, slim, and athletic, the father of four, he looked the part of an FBI man. He was a New York boy, born and raised in the Irish ghetto at 125th Street and Riverside Drive. His family
moved to New Jersey, and Curran worked his way through college with his first FBI job, as a clerk in the Newark office. He got his degree in 1968 and became an FBI agent the same year. The bureau sent him to New York in 1972, and he began a full-time career as a counterspy. In the Soviet section at headquarters in the mid-1980s, he had worked on some of the most important cases—Pelton, Howard, and Yurchenko.

In August 1994, Curran came from the FBI to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and took over the Counterespionage Group (CEG). In that post, he also supervised the SIU, which was first located on the fourth floor of the new CIA headquarters building and then hidden undercover behind an unmarked door on the first floor of the adjoining older headquarters building. About seven CIA and three or four FBI specialists staffed the SIU. So secret was the mole hunt unit that very few of the 125 employees of the CIA’s Counterespionage Group knew what it was doing or even where it was. Only a handful of CIA people were allowed into the SIU office, although dozens of FBI agents had free access.

The agency and the bureau had historically mixed like oil and water. In part, this was due to their different missions. The CIA’s task was to collect intelligence; the FBI was ultimately a law-enforcement agency with responsibility for investigating crimes and arresting people, including spies. Conflicts were bound to arise.

“Whenever the CIA has a problem they circle the wagons,” said one FBI counterintelligence agent. “And it’s not just CIA. NSA had polygraphed a guy ten times, and he failed each time. A code clerk, he’d had sex with transvestites in Asian alleyways; his regular sex partner was a German shepherd. To wait as long as they did before calling in the FBI was outrageous. We never made a case against the code clerk.”

As the SIU began its work, there were inevitable clashes of cultures and personalities. Redmond, a Harvard man from Massachusetts who could swear in Serbo-Croatian—he had served in Yugoslavia for the CIA, as well as in the Near East—and Curran, the street-smart New Yorker, did not get along. But the bureaucratic infighting was largely the result of the presidential order putting the FBI onto the CIA’s turf.

The new mole hunt team got off to a rocky start. Only Diana Worthen, a midwesterner who had been Ames’s intelligence assistant in Mexico City, was a holdover from Jeanne Vertefeuille’s task force. She had good qualifications for the job—it was Worthen who was the first to raise the alarm about her old boss when she saw his affluent lifestyle
and large house in Arlington, Virginia. But Worthen stayed with the new mole hunt unit less than two years.

Laine Bannerman, whose father had headed CIA security a generation earlier, was the first, albeit short-lived, head of the SIU. “She was very friendly, a DO person from the Russian side,” Curran said, “but very protective of the CIA. She thought she was in charge and would decide what the FBI got. We had to resolve that right away. We immediately had conflicts. She’s trying to protect the agency’s jewels, and we’re trying to investigate.”

Soon, Mary Sommer, a CIA reports officer from the Central Eurasian (CE) division, was brought in to run the unit, although Bannerman remained a member. With all the bureaucratic clashes going on, Curran imported Jim Milburn from the FBI to work with the SIU. Milburn was one of the two analysts who had prepared the study of moles in the FBI that Robert Hanssen had directed in 1988.

Essentially, the mole hunt never ended, because the search for penetrations carried out under the cryptonyms
TRAPDOOR, ANLACE, PLAYACTOR/SKYLIGHT
, and
NIGHTMOVER
had now been taken over by the SIU. “There was no crypt,” said Curran. “We didn’t want people to know what we were doing.”

Although there were only ten CIA and FBI specialists who composed the SIU, fifty or sixty FBI agents were assigned to the mole hunt at Buzzard’s Point, then the location of the bureau’s Washington field office. “They had desks and badges at CIA and could come and go as they pleased,” Curran said.

In addition to those assigned to the field office and at the CIA, other agents at FBI headquarters were detailed to the search for the mole. They were based, and kept their files, in the “Black Vault,” an oddly shaped secure room on the fourth floor directly across from the Soviet section where Hanssen had worked.
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In the FBI’s New York City field office, meanwhile, a separate mole hunt was in progress. Cases had gone bad, and the bureau had source information hinting that there was a penetration in the New York office. Louis Freeh, the new FBI director, became convinced that agents in the
Big Apple were not pursuing the problem vigorously enough. Freeh abruptly transferred the bureau’s New York counterintelligence chief and named Thomas J. Pickard, an accountant by training, to replace him. Pickard in turn brought Tim Caruso to New York as his deputy.

Soon a more intense mole hunt was under way. Robert Wade was dispatched from headquarters to work the case “off campus,” in FBI parlance, which meant he operated quietly out of an apartment on the west side of Manhattan, with a team of three or four agents from headquarters and a like number carefully chosen from the New York field office.

According to Pickard, the mole hunters drew up a list of everyone, including special agents, who worked in counterintelligence and had access to the cases that had gone south. “About two hundred employees, special agents, support employees, were looked at,” he said. One FBI agent in particular became the chief suspect, but nothing was ever proven against him.